Siri has been around for ages. Apple keep plugging Siri as this really useful personal assistant, but in all the time Siri has been living in my iPhone, I have found exactly 1 use for her/it. In the morning, when my alarm goes off, if I shout Hey Siri! across the room, she will silence my alarm without me having to get out of bed. That is it. That is the one use that Siri has for me. I think Siri could be great. Siri could be the best assistant out there. But the fact of the matter is that Siri isn’t the best assistant out there, not by a long shot. The reason that Siri is so useless is because of Apple. It’s not that they haven’t developed Siri enough, it’s that they do that thing that Apple are famous for; walling her off in her own secret garden and never let her out to play . . . (that sounded creepy). To be perfectly honest, now that I think about it, they’re all like that. I’ve tried Google Now, and that isn’t very useful either, although that is partially because of Apple’s sandboxing among other things. I’ve also tried Evi, which doesn’t have an iPad version and doesn’t do landscape mode, not to mention it still suffers from the walled garden effect. And Assistant.ai, which is quite frankly, grating; I thought we were passed the days of those clearly synthesised voices – I know I can buy a nicer voice, but I shouldn’t have to – also, there’s a difference between using a personal pronoun to refer to a virtual assistant, and going full dolphin with the anthropomorphism. Assistant.ai does use Api.ai, though, which is a plus, I have wanted to put Api.ai into one of my own projects for a while now, but we’ll see. There is this new one, Hound, but it’s not available in the UK, so . . . that’s that then. Of course, all of them are stunted by Apple. Only Siri may be the default assistant, so it would be unfair to judge the competitors on their inability to be accessed without unlocking the device and loading the app manually. Damn you Apple! But the crux of the problem is this. All of the assistants are useless because they don’t let me make them better. By that, what...

On the 28th of November 2013, Facebook locked me out of my own account. They gave no warning, they gave no satisfactory reason; they just locked me out. Upon logging in, I am presented with this: Apropos of nothing, Facebook has had the audacity to tell me, not ask me, to tell me that I am not who I say I am. Furthermore, they refuse to tell me what it was that made this happen; was it a link I posted? Is the name Dan Barker really that farfetched? What? Why? Facebook is holding my account hostage; their demands? They demand a copy of my government issued ID; driving licence, passport, etc. Because of Facebook’s actions we are at a stalemate. They refuse to tell me why my account has been locked. I refuse to send them anything, of any kind, until I get a satisfactory answer. This stalemate is compounded further by the fact that it is so bloody hard to actually contact Facebook. They don’t have any support, they don’t have any representatives to speak to, they don’t even have a damn email address. Even if I do get my account back, Facebook are never going to apologise for this. They’re never even going to acknowledge that it ever happened. Worse still, they will never admit that they made a mistake. I am the only person who is going to have to pay for this mistake, Facebook’s mistake. Either I give in and let them have even more privileged, personal information, or I give up and lose my account. Neither of these are acceptable. Facebook need to acknowledge that they made a mistake, they need to fix it and they need to apologise. Update 01/12/13 I thought I’d try to login today, no harm after all, and I found a pleasant surprise. I now have my account back! Yay! But I still don’t know what happened. I’ve had nothing from Facebook by way of an apology (but lets face it that’s never going to happen) and I’ve had nothing to tell me what either I did, or went wrong at Facebook that caused me to be locked out. This is a very strange way to treat your...

Siri has been around for ages. Apple keep plugging Siri as this really useful personal assistant, but in all the time Siri has been living in my iPhone, I have found exactly 1 use for her/it. In the morning, when my alarm goes off, if I shout Hey Siri! across the room, she will silence my alarm without me having to get out of bed. That is it. That is the one use that Siri has for me. I think Siri could be great. Siri could be the best...

On the 28th of November 2013, Facebook locked me out of my own account. They gave no warning, they gave no satisfactory reason; they just locked me out. Upon logging in, I am presented with this: Apropos of nothing, Facebook has had the audacity to tell me, not ask me, to tell me that I am not who I say I am. Furthermore, they refuse to tell me what it was that made this happen; was it a link...

As part of my community service university degree, I find myself being directed to create a blog! Unnamed university thinks that this is a good and reasonable use of my time and money – yes, social media is a big deal, and yes knowing how to use technology is also a big deal, but I find myself wondering how something quite so basic worms its way into the second year of a degree level course. Many of the people in this room were born...

Up until 25/08/13, I used the Gleam theme from Elegant Themes, well worth the money if you ask me, but this theme does use a lot of AJAX, whatever that is. All I know is that the Hashbang you sometimes see in the URL (#!) can be a source of great sadness when it comes to WordPress Plugins. To that end, here is a list of all the plugins I use that either work well with AJAX, or work well with AJAX after a bit of tweaking. ...

So I’ve been super busy these last few weeks. I started a 3-year degree course, still haven’t finished my part-time course, started 2 new secret projects which you’ll find out about later, and I spent literally 25 hours perfecting this new WordPress theme, and even now I’ve still got stuff to do. Soon I’ll have amassed all the header pictures I need for all the existing posts and the ones I’ve been...

Having had to deal with a number of spontaneous pneumothoraces over the years, I have spent a good deal of time online looking for information about procedure and pain. There are many articles online that detail exactly what a pneumothorax is, who is prone to it, why it happens and, indeed, what can be done about it, but there is very little that actually explains, in clear, laymen’s terms, what happens during the procedure, how...

There are lots of people on the Internet who have posted similar articles about their desire to leave the social networking monolith, probably because they are looking for some kind of legacy; a kind of “look at me! I did this years ago, look at the post date!” But not me, I am not looking for a legacy of any kind, nor am I posting this for your benefit. When I am trying to work something out, I write. The only reason I am posting it...

Shortly after Facebook announced that it had purchased new-media-re-working-of-old-media start up company Instagram, myself and Sunny Kotak (and with contributions from Abdiaziz Muse) wrote the following paper, submitting to BPP Business School, London, for which we received distinction. Was Instagram Worth $1 Billion Dollars? By Daniel Barker and Sunny Kotak (contributions from Abdiaziz Muse) In 2004, Facebook unveiled itself...

By it’s very nature, it is an incredibly difficult thing to describe, but I shall try: Of sturdy construction, and seemingly immovable, it presses down on my in-brain keyboard, stopping me from accessing it properly. My brain’s word processing software is spewing out thousands of errors, and there are lines and lines of squiggly red and green highlights, all because the block is pressing down on all the keys at once. It’s...